Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Life Span
to
Full name
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Place of Birth
Burial Place
Birth Date Certainty
Exact
Death Date Certainty
Exact
Gender
Male
Race
White
Sectional choice
North
Origins
Free State
No. of Siblings
7
No. of Spouses
2
No. of Children
6
Family
Stephen Longfellow (father), Zilpah Wordsworth Longfellow (mother), Mary (first wife), Francis Appleton (second wife)
Education
Other
Other Education
Bowdoin College, ME
Occupation
Educator
Writer or Artist
Relation to Slavery
White non-slaveholder
Church or Religious Denomination
Unitarian or Universalist

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American National Biography)

Scholarship
Longfellow's literary reputation, like [Alfred] Tennyson's, has suffered from the inevitable changes in poetic style and taste. He has been called too didactic, but when he began writing he was widely blamed for sacrificing uplift to purely aesthetic considerations. "A Psalm of Life" (1839) seems one of his poorest poems, but his contemporaries, including the French poet Charles Baudelaire, found it deeply moving. An impatient reader and writer, Longfellow wanted everything stated as quickly and as plainly as possible, not left to implication and inference. Yet he was a scholar and far less simple than his work suggests. He admired the primitive, and in his Indian poems and elsewhere he introduced important native materials into American literature. Yet he also played an important part in establishing modern languages in the American educational curriculum, and he labored valiantly to introduce American readers to large aspects of the literature and art of Europe, encouraging them to enter into the common cultural inheritance of Western culture.
Edward Wagenknecht, "Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01015.html.
Chicago Style Entry Link
Blue, Frederick J. “The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship.” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 273-297. view record
How to Cite This Page: "Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/12870.